While the Colombian government has insisted paramilitary groups are no longer a problem, the targeted murder of social leaders has raised alarms.

In March, Todd Howland, the representative of the U.N. high commissioner for human rights in Colombia, warned: "There is a pattern here relative to where the killings are occurring. FARC's leaving these areas has really complicated the lives of (human rights) leaders."

According to Carlos Alfonso Negret, the Human Rights Ombudsman of Colombia, nearly 200 social leaders have been murdered in Colombia since the beginning of 2016.

An estimated 7 million people have been displaced across Colombia, mostly from rural areas, which have become battlefields for over half of a century of fighting between guerrilla rebels, state armed forces and their unofficial allies, the paramilitaries.